This is where I share motherhood, recipes, random experiences and other stuff I find interesting!

Monthly Archives: February 2017

Winter is slowly turning into spring here. Lambs are gambolling in the fields, snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils are beginning to poke their heads out of their warm winter beds and the birds are becoming more active as they plan to start their new families. We still have about 6 weeks before our ewes start to lamb, and we are ticking off the days, beginning preparations such as making sure we have all the necessary drugs and supplies, getting all the ewes vaccinated so that they and the lambs stay healthy, and working out which fields each group is going to go to! I am also waiting to find out what’s wrong with my knee. I had the MRI scan last night, so hopefully we will get some answers in about 2 weeks. Whether the news will turn out to be good or bad remains to be seen, but at least we will know what’s actually going on and hopefully have an end in sight.

To keep busy, I’ve started making my own bread. I’d tried in the past and never had a huge amount of success, but after the bread we normally buy went up by 5p a loaf we decided it would be cheaper to make our own. My husband was talking about getting a breadmaker, but I’v had my heart set on a stand mixer for a long time and as they cost about the same (2nd hand) and have far more uses, I persuaded him that was the way to go. I quickly found on, fairly locally, on a preloved selling site, at a decent price and with a huge number of attachments, which appear to be unused and in their original boxes. A few days later, armed with my new mixer and the necessary ingredients, I set about making my first loaf of bread. It had been my birthday recently, the mixer being a sort of birthday present, and my parents had bought me a new set of scales, the type with a dial on the front that weighs in kg and lbs, and a dish that sits on top to hold the ingredients. I put all the ingredients in the mixer bowl and set it going. ‘It shouldn’t be this wet’ I remarked to DH, watching it slop around in the bowl. ‘There’s no way it will be handle-able, maybe the recipe was written down wrong or I shouldn’t have put all the water in’. ‘Just dump some more flour in’, he helpfully replied. I poured in enough extra flour to make the dough at least bind together and hoped we’d get something edible as the result. It rose quite nicely, but by the time it was baked it was about 3 inches high, the flattest loaf of bread I’d ever seen. Despite being more crumpet-like in appearance, with large air holes in every slice, it tasted so much better than the shop-bought loaf. I decided to try again in a day or two but with a difference recipe.

As I sat at the table enjoying a hot cup of tea and reflecting on the bread making experience, I was idly looking at the scales on the table in front of me and thinking that there was a slight design flaw. The kg are marked around the outside and the lbs are marked on the inside of the dial. The needle that points to the weight is fairly wide at the middle and narrows down to a point by the time it hits the kg markings. The only problem is that it is still a bit wide where it points to the lb markings, and it can be hard to see exactly where it is pointing. ‘Well that shouldn’t have been an issue today’, I thought. ‘The weights were all in kg’. A pause, and then, ‘No, I can’t have been that stupid!’. I stared at the scales, thought a moment, then grabbed the half-used bag of flour and weighed it. That confirmed my suspicions. I WAS that stupid. Instead of using a kg of flour, I had used a lb. No wonder it was so wet!

I tried again once we had eaten all the crumpet-loaf, making sure to use the correct amounts this time, and got some sensible, normal bread. I still maintain that my underweighed bread tasted better! We are still in the trialling stage at the moment, but all the bread has been perfectly edible, tasty in fact. The little one actually eats more of the home-made bread than he ever did of the bought stuff. It will take a lot of saved 5p’s to pay for the mixer, but long term I think we’re on to a winner.